"I don't want them to think about me, or the time on my computer, or how much time is left, or when lunch is. That's just a distraction, and including it in the slides would be counterproductive."
I totally get that you don't want your audience to focus on the clock, and they should be paying attention to what you're saying. That's a perfectly valid reason to not show the clock. There are, however, many cases where it would be perfectly cromulent to have the clock there. I say this, because the vast majority of presentations I've given or sat in on, the clock was somehow involved.
Some considerations:
When I was in the military, we practiced "hitting our mark" for briefings over and over again. But the real life scenario is that the col. or general always has somewhere else to be at the bottom or top of the hour. That's the governing factor- if he comes in late, or you don't plan for the appropriate Q&A time, you don't get to encroach past the end of your time. This is duplicated in just about every meeting I've ever given in civilian life as well- the top or bottom of the hour indicates when we stop or start, and the presenter will always ask the audience anyway if that needs to deviated from. The clock is the governing authority over everyone's time and/or the meeting room that was scheduled, it should be viewable.
Regarding distracting people by having the clock on the screen, sure, but it's certainly less distracting than having half your audience look at their watch because they have another meeting to get to in 3 minutes. At least they can know what time it is discreetly without having to look at their watch. (lets face it, not every meeting is drop dead engaging, yes, they should be- but lets deal with the realities of the situation). Besides, most people don't have watches anymore anyway.
I haven't used any recent iteration of PowerPoint (work is using Office 2003), but from what I've seen, Office 2007 only addresses half of the problem. It allows you to see the clock in the presenter view, but as I've already noted before- often the presenter isn't the "top dog" with control of the meeting. In most of my experiences, presentations are to superiors who are always dealing with other projects of equal or greater importance to what the presenter is talking about, they are the ones with control over when/where the stop/starts are.
There are a ton of timer based functions and additions, macros, scripts, whatever for PowerPoint and similar products for timing the presenter. But don't think I've ever seen anyone ever use anything like that ( I've worked in technology, health care, banking, and the military, all predominantly used PowerPoint in it's easiest/roughest form). None of these functions really matter in my experience- it's always about what time is on the clock.
Does this make sense? What do you think? Distracting? Needed? Or do presentation tools already address this? (again, I'm on Office 2003, I'm not sure if 2007 does this)
It’s ironic (and predicable) that the interfaces SUPPLE comes up with for dexterity/visually impaired people are just better interfaces than the controls. The optimized interfaces almost always display more information in a way that requires less clicking than the original interfaces. No wonder they perform better! It’s just a direct application of Fitts’s law and GOMs analysis.
One interesting thing to call out: The interfaces for SUPPLE are defined by schematic intent, not by layout. The computer translates a user-flow markup into an actual interface. We’ll probably see a lot more of this as we need to design web sites for truly divergent screen-sizes (computer, mobile, wall screens).
I was looking at this content management software Plone CMS tonight and saw something that made me grin...
Of the four "marketing points" on the homepage, one is the following:
Have we reached the point where a usability stamp of approval (of some sort) is a marketable item? Nobody wants to say "now easier to use!" -but the mention that the experts have made the product easy and productive to work with turns a few heads. Granted, I'm probably an exception considering I took the time to start up this site and all, but if I see that usability considerations were made upfront, I'm more apt to try the software out. Some times you can intuit it from the company that put its out, but when picking from the cavalcade of CMS software out there, it's an attention grabber for (at least) me.
I'd love to see this catch on with software- I've thought many times how nice it would be to have a website of "usable reviews" where usability experts review software & products and provide opinions. I think we all make due by just checking our favorite writers and taking recommendations as we come across them, but it would be nice to have some kind of "usability rating" assigned to products (for instance: The UPA give this 3 out of 4 "Donald Norman Teapots")
*For what it's worth, I haven't installed Plone and I'm not sure how usable it is, I just thought it was interesting that usability is getting front page attention.
Am I the only one that thought these: < > scroll selectors in this Visual Source Safe Option menu is a bit strange? It's a case of window size vs. content visibility...and I say in this case, the tab visibility should have won out... there's just two small tabs tucked away in the scrolled menu, could they really not just expand the window out a bit further to accomodate them?
FYI- I do own this software and hardware- This screenshot came after a forced upgrade that I didn't request (of course, it worked fine before). If it's a security error (as dongles are traditionally used for), it's even more broken. But I think it just refers to the fact that this is a "dongle" that connects my cell phone to my computer. Here’s a useful message (direct/bigger link) I saw when I tried to hook my phone up to my computer :
dongle_mot0003/4 driver not found in modems.pac
Of course, I immediately slapped my forehead saying “ah! I knew I forgot something! That makes perfect sense, I’ll fix it right away….now where did I put that other 1/4th of the dongle driver?”
How about throwing some text in there that someone might understand with perhaps something I could do to fix it? If you need to have that error there, make it “additional details.”
Also- see that “click here” to refresh the list? How about that message repeated in the error box if it will help? Or better yet, just try (assuming it’s non-intrusive) to refresh anyway if you can’t find the right driver. Point is, there’s a ton of ways to handle this user interaction; I maintain that this is probably one of the poorer ways. What percentage of users know what a dongle is anyway? I guess it could be considered an anti-piracy measure.. someone calls up motorola and tells them they don't understand what's going on and they slap the cuffs on them.
If it *is* anti-piracy. It still could be something like: "Hey, stop stealing our software!" or something along those lines instead.
Publish and subscribe via XML make any sense to you? How about Copy & Paste? There's a cool demo and some work being done in this area which is being coined "Live Clipboard" that is much more palatable than my first sentence, and it's VERY interesting.
Read "Wiring the Web" for the background, but warning- that read can get just about as technical as you want it to be if you follow all the links through the rabbit hole. After that, try out the demo! Note, for reasons explained here, it doesn't work in Opera. But it's worth firing up Firefox or IE to have a look.. in fact, fire 'em both up and load the page in both- copy & paste data across browsers!
Why am I posting this here? It's the best "user-centered" approach to publish/subscribe I've ever seen and a compelling proof of concept.
Why should User Centered readers care? Well, in the demo, you'll see a clipboard icon. You can right click and copy that information like you do just about everywhere else on your computer. Still don't get it? Your not copying a string of text from a webpage, you're copying a Calendar item, or contact information and pasting it into another webpage that understands what to do with it (how to consume it). So, if google were to implement this in calendar page, I could copy the calendar events from the demo linked above, and just "paste" it into google as a new event. This allows each website the ability to "wire the web" themselves. Similar to the way that site authors can code their pages to hook you up with RSS feeds or as Opera has recently done, to announce a widget.
My first recommended use of this is: (in addition to the author's thoughts) Have authors implement a "blog this" type button on each post... so if I want to reference say... Hallvors post on why it doesn't work in Opera, I can click the "Live Clipboard" button, hit control-C, and Paste it into my own blog posting all nicely formatted. Maybe depending on how or where I paste it, it will "consume" it differently-
Paste it *in* my own blog post, it will show up as a link: ...but if I paste it as a *new* blog post, it will show up in whole. (I'm not sure what happened to this image as I was working with it, but you get the idea) ...which I could see being useful for a "manual entry" for aggregator sites like Planet Opera. Put a post up without having to subscribe to the feed.
While struggling through yet another futile attempt to get a home network up and running with my D-Link router (There's not enough my.opera hosting space to hold the number of posts I could write on this horrible user experience), I kept getting confused by this winXP security menu: ..On the surface, the first menu(on the right for those not familiar) seems pretty user centered. You got the obligatory, and easy to undertand stoplight metaphor in conjunction with the checkmarks/"X", and the shields. All the trappings of a decent, easy to learn interface. It's the fact that you can't really do much with that menu that makes this confusing. More importantly, there's no reason why you shouldn't be able to.
You have to click on "Windows Firewall" at the bottom there (which throws me every time I see this screen after a long period of time), only to be presented with the dialog on the left. So much visual "weight" is given to the "Security Essentials" section that I assume that's where I need to be to handle my firewall... but all for naught! ("turn around please"*) I have to find the other firewall control on the same screen.
I propose the following, hastily manipulated image instead. You can throw some of the descriptive text in there if you'd like as well... My "advanced" button I pasted there would lead you to the "Exceptions" and "Advanced" tab from the first screenshot above.. as well as the "Recommendations." Anyway, the key is, the bulk of time, I just want to turn it on or off quickly, and I rarely mess with the "advanced" options, but apart from that, the original interface seems shattered. In the first image above, what's the difference in the average user's mind between "Security Essentials" and "Manage Security Settings for:"? Isn't it essential to manage security?
When you need a question answered about something like "should the keyboard up arrow increase my numbers, or decrease them?" you should undoubtedly go to the tape. But last I checked, I haven't seen a major news correspondent that covers these matters, so Dan at Infrandom.com (a long time friend of mine) posed this very question to me directly in regards to the Visual Studio IDE (an integrated development environment...still nothing? ummm...its for programming).
IDEs are a bit different though. They are built by programmers for programmers. Usability guys try to fight against programmers putting their techie mindset into the end user products, but of course, in this case, the end user is going to be a techie too- so (in theory) it should be fine. But Dan is a programmer, and he's got an annoyance with his IDE/
So, like the rest of the known world, I thought it was cool to get a RAZR phone that I've had now for about 6 months or so. I've since come to the conclusion that the only thing I really like about it is the form factor/physical design of it (and I'm not the only one).
Phone comments aside, the most confusing thing about the phone is the PC software that you can purchase to go with it. The designers decided to duplicate the phone's appearance; they used the phone metaphor, which, back in the day (which you can pin down as being over 10 years ago) it was thought to be a good idea because people needed the familiarity making it easier to learn. But the problem with this notion was quite frankly, that model sucks for several reasons: because it carried over the SAME limitations as the real world, often it doesn't or can't accurately mimic the real world device and trying to emulate those real world interfaces with a mouse a keyboard is, at best, cumbersome.
This RAZR application is no different. None of the buttons make any sense when applied to this software application. I mean, think about it- if the buttons on the phone were sufficient, why would I even need software on the PC? (backgroud- this application is supposed to run along with the phone, not in place of it)
Of course that's not the case at all.. noooooo my friends. The PC software has all kinds of different functions. But since they make absolutely NO sense in this interface, there's this little "slide out" menu on the side with all these functions.
So, apart from the fact that there's no reason at all to limit the interface to the actual size of my phone, 90 percent of even that space is taken up just so I can dial number and place calls.. on my computer. Ummm. Anyway, almost every function you execute pulls up a real windows-type dialog or window after clicking.. it's just impossible with this interface to know what and where everything is.
Obvious: It's a windows application- treat it as such. There's no reason at all to mimic the look and feel of the phone, especially since you completely violate the mappings and functions of the real phone. So buttons I click on my phone are disabled in this software, or replaced with fake buttons- or they do something completely different (see other observations).
By my estimation and actual use, almost all useful functionality for this software is found in the slide out menu there that (of course) isn't at all related to the actual phone. These functions have strange icons that aren't consistent and are difficult to figure out.
Other observations:
The "close" button for the application is not the red "off" button of the phone. Instead, it's the exact same looking icon at the bottom, but grey.
The soft keys and the circular navigation keys don't do anything
There are several new keys introduced here- The phone and the green circle appear to both be "call" functions, but the phone actually pull up the "call a contact" dialog box.
There is a phone book icon there that isn't the same icon as the phone uses. This is the case for other icons as well. There are no less that three "envelope" icons visible. I know what they all are, but still- that's a bit much. The multimedia studio (the bells icon) launches what appears to be a completely different (and somewhat better designed) application that almost makes me completely forget that there is a RAZR phone on my desktop. I imagine most people spend the majority of time there getting/setting images and ringtones and the like that it almost warrants a stand alone application.
WIDGETIZE